California’s only ‘pirate’ raid in history was...

1of5Reenactors portraying Argentine privateers/pirates head for shore to pull down the Spanish flag and raise the Argentine flag above Monterey as Spanish troops retreat during the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Monterey.Photo: Patrick Tehan / Special to The Chronicle

2of5Reenactors portraying Argentine privateers/pirates come ashore as Spanish troops retreat during the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Monterey.Photo: Patrick Tehan / Special to The Chronicle

3of5Reenactors portraying Argentine privateers and pirates prepare to pull down the Spanish flag and raise the Argentine flag above Monterey as Spanish troops retreat during the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Monterey in California.Photo: Photos by Patrick Tehan / Special to The Chronicle

4of5The Lady Washington sails offshore as part of the reenactment.Photo: Patrick Tehan / Special to the Chronicle

5of5Howard Burnham, as Franco-Argentine Capt. Hipólito Bouchard, addresses the crowd outside the historic customhouse during the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Monterey.Photo: Patrick Tehan / Special to The Chronicle

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Volleys of cannon fire echoed through the adobes of Monterey, followed by a group of privateers storming the city from the sea with cannon, muskets and pikes. Eventually they pulled down the Spanish flag before hoisting up the blue-and-white stripes of Argentina under a Californian sky.

The scene played out in November 1818, when a Franco-Argentine privateer named Hipólito Bouchard and 200 of his men sacked Monterey, the royal Spanish capital of Alta California, in the name of revolution and booty. Two hundred years later, on Nov. 17, a group of men and women re-enacted the battle at Custom House Plaza in Monterey. While both quaint and kitschy, the depiction sought to recast California lore’s most notable pirate as a brash captain fighting for Mexican rule of California, and to commemorate an often-misunderstood event in the state’s early history.

“The Spanish at the time had seen him as a pirate, and people have piggybacked onto that idea since,” says Michael Melzer, a writer in Pasadena whose 2016 book “The Patriot Pirate” details the life and times of Bouchard. “If anything, Bouchard represents the movement for Latin American independence.”

Reenactors portraying Spanish soldiers stand in formation in front of the historic customhouse during the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Monterey in California.

Photo: Patrick Tehan / Special to The Chronicle

In 1818, revolutionary fervor in Spain’s American colonies was upending the king’s rule from Argentina to Mexico. Yet at the same time, Alta California was a near-feudal backwater loyal to the royal order, says Monterey County naval historian John Middleton-Tidwell.

Bouchard, born in southeast France in 1780, made his way to Buenos Aires by 1810, where he quickly joined the Argentine war for independence, fighting on both land and water, Melzer said. At age 37, after seven years of fame and infamy in service to the revolution, he received his letters of marque in 1817, giving him permission to raid ports and ships loyal to the Spanish crown across the globe, spread revolutionary ideals and reap the spoils.

The captain and his crew limped into the Hawaiian Islands in mid-1818 empty-handed after only inflicting minor damage on the Spanish in the Philippines, Middleton-Tidwell said. There Bouchard acquired a second ship, the Santa Rosa, and heard of the vulnerable provincial capital, Monterey.

The two ships under Bouchard’s command were spotted by the Spanish off Point Pinos in present-day Pacific Grove on Nov. 20, 1818. At that time, the captain’s letters of marque from the Argentine government had expired, so while the Spanish would have considered him a pirate regardless, under the letter of the law any attack would be an act of piracy.

The larger ship La Argentina stayed farther out, and the Santa Rosa sailed near shore in an attempt to fool the Spanish into believing they were American merchant vessels, but the Spanish had been already tipped off by an American captain who had caught wind of Bouchard’s plans in Hawaii, and they had reinforced their defenses, Middleton-Tidwell said.

The next day Santa Rosa sustained a number of direct hits from two directions, forcing the outgunned ship to raise the white flag in surrender as a furious Bouchard looked on from a distance. Three men went ashore under threat and were arrested; others rowed to the Argentina, while the wounded were left to wait for an unknown fate aboard the Santa Rosa.

On Nov. 22, Bouchard landed 200 men and four cannons around what is now Lovers Point. His crew far exceeded the number of men of fighting age in Monterey. In preparation for the attack, Pablo Vicente de Solá, the royal governor of Alta California, had ordered the town to evacuate to Rancho del Rey, near modern-day Salinas, and take any valuables with them.

Bouchard’s men quickly overtook a cannon emplacement and replaced a Spanish flag there with Argentina’s. Leading the charge was a group of naked Hawaiian islanders who had joined Bouchard in Oahu.

“The sight of the unclothed Hawaiians scared the Spanish and might have hastened their retreat,” Middleton-Tidwell says.

The privateers went onto the former site of the presidio around the present-day San Carlos Cathedral and again overran the Spanish. Solá and his remaining men then fled to Rancho del Rey.

For two days, Bouchard and his men celebrated their victory and began to repair the damaged Santa Rosa. On the third day, Bouchard sent a message to Solá saying if he didn’t return the three prisoners, he would lay waste to the town. The governor didn’t respond, so the captain burned Spanish property, killed the remaining livestock and torched the orchards, while sparing Catholic churches and non-Spanish homes.

But the small provincial capital didn’t yield Bouchard and his men much booty or revolutionary sympathizers. Solá would later claim that the main losses incurred by Spanish forces were of ham, butter and blankets.

Middleton-Tidwell notes that the Hawaiian fighters left wearing Spanish clothing, some pieces of which were from Solá’s own wardrobe.

Bouchard and his men sailed south from Monterey around Nov. 27 and made three more destructive stops along the Alta California coast, looking for supplies and booty. He never returned to California but continued his revolutionary fight in South America. The story of his North American exploits was left to be told by those who survived his attacks.

Alta California became Mexican territory in 1821 and then came under U.S. authority after the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Since then Bouchard has come to be viewed by some as a pirate more than a patriot. First-person interviews of people who survived the attack, chronicled in early histories of California, refer to Bouchard that way, Middleton-Tidwell says.

The 200th anniversary re-enactment is aimed at dispelling those early impressions. While the attack on the California coast 200 years ago might be a footnote in state history, Bouchard is known as a national hero in Argentina, Melzer said.

“Bouchard was a revolutionary who grew up in revolutionary France,” Middleton-Tidwell says. “It has taken nearly two centuries to correct the story.”